Europe Central (17 page)

Elena was sitting beside him at the Kirov Theater, just before the curtain rose on his new opera “Lady Macbeth.” Wordlessly she slipped her coat over her shoulders, rose up, turned away and walked out.

21

He rushed after her; he knelt down in the dirty slush and begged. (I was there, trailing A. Akhmatova; I remember snow on the iron fence around the Summer Garden, snow on the Summer Garden’s trees.) And she took him home with her; she knew he loved her! What was he so afraid of? Between the two of them they’d long since determined the way that the second movement begins, with its haunting Russian melody in a minor key, passageways of Rodchenko-like golden scaffolding subsequently connecting it to a merry melody which after a very particular, never to be replicated cello-caress becomes buttery-sweet and brief, because he was on his back and she was astride him, teasing him with the succulent inner lips of her cunt and slowly possessing him, taking orgasm after orgasm, forbidding him to move, pausing whenever she liked, as long as she liked; and all the while he had to keep lying perfectly still like a good boy! Then comes that rocking-horse sequence I’ve mentioned, which transforms itself into another sweet eternity of melting butter: He’d finished, and Elena was back on top of him again, riding him in just the way she liked until she climaxed with the sound of a honeybee, the bow passing smoothly and shrilly across the sounding board. Returning to the Russian melody, Opus 40 then gives the piano another turn at pleasuring itself, so that a second rocking-horse copulation gallops to a happy ejaculation, at which point the piano sparkles and glows; I have it on good authority that at that point they were making love at dawn, and right before they finished, the sounds of morning began as the sun sparkled and glared most busily upon an upturned water-glass, transforming it into an improbable spider-jewel whose legs were beams of white light.

22

The true story of Opus 40 comes to an end at the end of a certain night in the summer of 1935, when the sleepless woman finally dialed Shostakovich’s number. Nina answered and curtly said: He’s staying with me.

I kept waiting and waiting by the telephone, whispered Elena, just in case he was going to call.

23

Regarding Opus 40, Shostakovich remained everlastingly coy, no doubt for Nina’s sake, but he did state for the record that a certain great breakthrough (or, as the Germans would say,
ein grosser Durchbruch)
took place for him that year in the sphere of chamber and concert platform music. (Shostakovich to Konstantinovskaya:
Why did I meet you? Why did I fall in love? I could have lived peacefully. My life as it was does not exist anymore.
)

The premiere took place on 25 December 1935. Elena Konstantinovskaya was absent. Those who wish us ill would doubtless insist on drawing attention to the fact that, following the line laid down by Comrade Stalin, we’d arrested a few thousand more of those scum by then, including Elena. I’m well aware that in the transit prison she received a postcard from Shostakovich—another black mark against him. Having verified all the documents in this matter, I can assure you that the reorganization of the Komsomol had become urgently necessary by then; every district branch was crawling with class enemies. Nothing definite was ever proved against Elena. All the same, let’s not cry crocodile tears over inconveniences suffered by a person who was, like all persons, the legitimate focus of interest of our Soviet state. Far more germane to this study of Opus 40 is the fact that the concert, as I can personally testify, was a success, I might even say a glittering success. So what if she wasn’t present? After all, the composer had dedicated it not to her but to his friend V. Kubatsky. ‣

OPERATION MAGIC FIRE

And it’s in that vague grey middle ground that the fundamental conflicts of our age take place. It’s a huge ant hill in which we all crawl.

—Shostakovich (ca. 1970)

1

The Poles say that life itself is a long smelly train of refugees which travels Europe’s slowest tracks, getting shunted aside to make room for military transports and industrial freight; there everyone sits, sweltering, stinking, fearing and grieving. The whistle shouts; time to move again! Here comes the next border, where policemen and plainclothesmen will winnow more of us away (her visa is incorrect; he’s actually an escaped Jew). The most laughable thing is that we hated life; we wanted to “get somewhere”; and now that they’re taking us somewhere by the truckload, we wish that we were still on that long train where everything stank! Well, that’s life, all right.

2

The story goes, and for all I know it hasn’t yet been discredited, that a quarter-hour after the best performance of Wagner’s “Siegfried” since our German recovery began, a certain sleepwalker retired to Haus Wahnfried, where the composer himself once lived, and as soon as Winifred Wagner had poured the tea and he’d kissed Verena Wagner’s wrist, those two ladies withdrew, Göring shut the door behind them, and Colonel Hagen, who’d been waiting in the corridor, led in a German businessman whose financial interests coincided with those of General Franco. This was the summer of 1936, when Franco’s cause remained desperate. Indeed, our Foreign Office most earnestly advised the sleepwalker not to involve himself, especially since the rebels needed not only bombs, but money. Herr Schacht at the Reichsbank kept warning that we couldn’t afford to rearm ourselves, let alone underwrite other people’s adventures. The sleepwalker, however, reasoned as follows: If Franco fails, then the leftist government in Spain will surely become a Communist satellite. And if that happens, France will also go Red, at which point our Reich will be menaced both from the East and from the West.—And wasn’t he correct? What brought us down in the end, but a two-front war?—In short, he agreed to help the Falangists. On the desert airstrip, our long line of propeller planes stood ready to stab the air with their needle-noses. (Incidentally, he also dismissed Herr Schacht, thereby saving him from getting hanged by the victors of 1945.)

And so our Condor Legion drew first blood; the Blitzkrieg got worked out. The aerial bombardment of Guernica turned out to be a contrapuntal masterpiece, and our new machine-guns didn’t jam, either. We did what we chose to; Mussolini’s Blue Arrow troops took up the slack. I think we can all agree that the war advanced rapidly. Three years later, there was Franco in the capital, with his trademark cigarette half burned down between his fingers. Mussolini sent him a bill, but we were more generous; we took the longer view.

The sleepwalker not only initiated this exercise, he also named it: Operation Magic Fire.

3

Now, in point of fact, it’s at the very end of “Die Walküre,” not in “Siegfried” at all, that the famous Magic Fire music occurs. Traditionally the four operas in the
Ring
Cycle get performed in an afternoon and three evenings; so when Colonel Hagen led in the businessman and Verena Wagner poured tea, it would have been only the previous night that “Die Walküre” was sung. I grant that that’s well within the bounds of a memory which was always supposed to be perfect; I’m referring to those statistics on troop dispositions and tank production, eternally ready on our Führer’s lips! If anybody on earth knew the
Ring
by heart, it would have been he. That’s precisely the reason I want to know why he didn’t draw on “Siegfried” when he christened the operation. After all, that opera offers plenty of dramatically appropriate music to choose from: the reforging of the sword, the slaying of the dragon, etcetera.

One of my most plausible speculations (I adore inventing those, since I can’t be held responsible for them) is that he’d already made up his mind to aid the Falangists on Valkyrie Night. After all, why would he have troubled himself to meet the businessman at all if he hadn’t already made his decision? For he was not exactly the sort of fellow whose conclusions could be altered by discusssion.

But it is also possible that the magic fire in and of itself means something in our Spanish context. Recapitulation: Brunnhilde has disobeyed Wotan by doing what he would have done himself, had he not been constrained by his own resentful promise: she saves Siegmund from death in his duel with Hunding, who’s an impure, un-German element. (Our sleepwalker could empathize with Wotan. He got quite angry whenever he had to pretend to endorse this or that non-aggression pact.) Wotan accordingly slays Siegmund for duty, Hunding for pleasure, disowns Brunnhilde, casts her into a supernatural sleep, and finally rings her round with flames which only a hero (Siegmund’s son Siegfried, as it will transpire) would dare to cross.

The scene is touching. Wotan, doomed and perjured ever since the very first opera, “Das Rheingold,” knows all too well that Brunnhilde is right. This correctness of hers springs from instinct; as such, it’s as impossible to “disprove” as Aryan superiority. Brunnhilde
is
Wotan, more than Wotan is himself. This is why he loves her so much.

He rumbles out a lullaby whose last words are:
For so goes the god from you; so he kisses your godhead away.
His voice cherishes and broods. Then it trails off. After a moment of silence, the music becomes tense, imperious. Wotan is now invoking Loki, the amoral fire-spirit. (I seem to see the Condor Legion in a triple line at the edge of their airstrip as a uniformed figure gazes down at them from a hill of flowers and desert shrubs, with their biplanes waiting.) He strikes his staff upon the ground. Instantly the fire springs up, walling in the sleeping woman who was once a Valkyrie. The biplanes take off! Wagner’s genius makes the fire music pleasant, not threatening. Loki is all play. He’s anything and everything. He eats a bad woman’s half-burned heart, gets pregnant, and gives birth to the race of ogres. He saves us from cold and he roasts us to death. His essence dances with equal gusto atop Brunnhilde’s mountain and the pyres at Dresden. Probably it is for this reason that when I hear the Magic Fire music I imagine not the rainbow of flame which the motif, played in isolation, might suggest, but the blue and green flames which spring from sea-salted driftwood. Wotan sings no more; the opera is ending now; but I seem to see him, black-cloaked and leaning on his staff, as he stands outside the circle which protects the daughter he has lost.

So let’s kiss away democracy from Spain! Let’s put her to sleep for a hundred years! Now here comes the wall of flame, flowering up from the metal seeds we’ve sown; and if you care to know how we planted them, I’ll draw you a full-page, double-column illustration of airplane formations: the
Gruppen-winkel:
three V’s in a row; the
Gruppenkeil:
three groups of three V’s, each of which consists of three machines, with the center one below the other two; meanwhile the centermost of the three groups likewise flies below its neighbors so that this constellation itself forms one more immense V; I should also mention the
Staffelkolonne links,
the
Staffelwinkel.
When we flew to Valencia, our
Gruppenkeil
dropped many seeds at once, each one something between a bullet and a dart, with a stinger on its end; they tumbled two by two through the air.

But now that everything has gone so wrong, I wonder which fairy god-mother we forgot to invite to the christening of Operation Magic Fire?

4

One evening almost five years later, Colonel Hagen and I agreed to meet for a steak dinner at the Ausland Club on the Leipziger Platz. I arrived early, so I had a beer and sat reading in the newspapers about the China Affair. Speaking frankly, even though the Japanese were now our allies and had even been labeled “honorary Aryans,” until then I had never been very much interested in the atrocities and conquests of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. No doubt this reveals my own limitations. I don’t know why I even remember the China Affair now. After all, I was never in China.—And we were having our own difficulties by then; let’s call them harmonic stresses. Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, even Norway, those operations had all gone satisfactorily (no one would deny that it’s healthy for us Germans to try to get what we want), but now the most powerful nations on earth were against us—naturally I didn’t count Russia in their number, since the sleepwalker had informed us that we only had to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure would come crashing down; moreover, we’d signed a treaty of near-eternal friendship with those Russians. What next? Our German machine-guns were faster than most other varieties, the French for instance, but a drunken gunner whose legs had gotten blown off in the siege of Warsaw wanted me to tell him whether we could keep making enough machine-guns to take on the whole world.—Absolute confidence, I replied to him, that is our capital. That’s what will see us through.